It is the fag end of April and I am wearing a sweater and am rubbing my hands in anticipation of heat while I swear my teeth are chattering to a tune from ‘Apocalypse Now’. No, I haven’t flown down to Antartica nor have I started vacationing in the Artic. I am just three weeks into my internship and half of my blood has already turned cold. Because the AC is in full blast and I am in office!

Meanwhile the green city of Bangalore is getting hotter by the day. So once you step out of office, suddenly you have stepped on to the equatorial line. While the radio keeps screaming ‘Mast Majaa Maadi’, you wonder what are the options for ‘Majaa’ when you are in a hot bus and there are about a lakh vehicles in front of you moving at the speed of 1 inch per 30 minutes.

There are four more guys along with me on my floor who are interns. Thus the grand total makes it five souls trying to learn the ropes of the IT industry. I wonder how they respond to publicity and hence we shall call them Him, Sud, Abby and Annie(LOL, this one rocks!).

The one major thing that my internship has taught me apart from the IT knowledge is when in the company of hungry lads, eat at the pace of one idli per minute. Cause if you don’t they would have finished their food, looked at all the sights in the vicinity and start fretting and sulking that it would make you want to renounce food for the rest of your life.

Now Annie is an HR whiz and spouts gyaan and gyaan only whenever he opens his mouth. Also, very enchanted by his work, he has actually learnt the art of apparating and disapparating, potter style. If you are having breakfast in the cafeteria in the morning, there would be a flash of light as a being would descend in the chair in front of you, there would be a flurry of food disappearing from a plate and whoosh, the appartition has gone. You would have heard ‘I have some work. Let me take your leave’ echoing in the background.

Him has an affinity to cheese and cheesy things. He also professes a deep liking for cheesy songs from bollywood of the 80s-90s. Thus he belongs to a dying breed or a breed whose leaders may include Reshamiya and the likes. When we are really happy, he sings ‘Neela Dupatta, Peela Suit’ to remind us of the brutal realities of life. Also, he can lecture on any topic under the sun. You wonder at the amount of gyaan one can give on a carelessly uttered word.

Sud and Abby are a ‘couple’ of conversations above us. They talk to each other while we go to lunch, while we come back from lunch, while they go for coffee, while we are in the elevator….er….you get the drift. Sometimes you have to look into the walls of the elevator to know if your presence is visible or pinch yourself. (You’d rather pinch one of them, though). They also say great things like male bonding is the best and other nice things.

Then there is Krupa and the newest member, Rekha….but yet to know them to well enough or they don’t have enough quirks. More to come….while I do some work for now..

Seriously, if the sambar of 69 was still around, it would have been a liquid form of ‘Terminator XII’ and would have proceeded to destroy the world with an universe of microbes staggering awake from harmless toor dal!
But the aim of this post is very different. It is to enunciate the hardships faced by a South Indian in BSchoolland. I do not support the MNS or the Sene and hence all words following this line are devoid of any political insinuation.

After you land in BSchool with your yellow bag (manja pai) and coconut oil, you realise that there are great assumptions that a Choudhary, Gupta, Rawat, Rajput, Chatterjee and other non-South Indian junta have about you and the land that you come from. Some I have cleared so far are:

1. No, all of South India does not speak Tamil. Though an effort was made to make it the national language . ‘Arre baap re!’ was a standard response I got to this one.

2. No, we do not yet have a temple for Rajinikanth. Though, poojas have been suspended in a temple for a South Indian actress.

3. No, it is not our hobby to wear huge cooling glasses/ shades and wear yellow or red dhotis and appear in huge hoardings pointing to Mars or Jupiter.

4. No, curd rice is not the only source of nutrition for our amazing brains. On second thoughts, maybe it is. 🙂

5. No, we don’t have only one use for milk : consumption. Our other creative uses include pouring them on Rajinikanth’s portraits and posters and sometimes on the screen.

6. No, all streets of Chennai do not terminate in a political party meeting. Some terminate in two of them.

7. No, we do not believe that we should follow the laws and rules of physics blindly. Rajinikanth and Vijaykanth are forerunners in this art when they try to do er…martial arts in their movies.

8. No, it is not mandatory that you have to cavort on screen with 80 multi-colored extras before you join politics.

And many more….

Anyways, the sad joke about Sambar of 69 could be attributed to an effort to better the works of Polo, the PJ Princess. Sample this :

Nothing very dubious about this post despite the dubious title. The exam season is on in full swing and between sleeping and waking, a good amount of time seems to be lost in either sleeping in the exam hall or outside it. Anyways, the ‘little amount’ of studying that an average MBA does is usually among groups, according to the latest report of (seriously-i-dont-care) institute.
And so the reading room in the hostel is perennially filled with young lasses who should ideally be pouting and posing (not my views) who are now poring over balance sheets of Raju company gone bad.
MANAC or Managerial Accounting is currently the flavour of the week after a disastrous ‘Financial Management’ attempt not so long ago but it seems a distant memory owing to conscious repression of depression-causing incidents by the human brain.
Hence, this Sunday night, I, Polo, Rajput and Jayaprakash convened in the reading room to gather some insight into this fascinating subject called MANAC. Incidentally, the MANAC professor is a very pleasant yet brilliant person who has taught us the basics of finance in candid humour. Sample this :
“Baaju wale ka bacha tere ghar pe aaya to tera bacha ho gaya kya?”

Coming back, as we squinted even more at the problems with increasingly shooting levels of frustration, Rajput, who had just finished one more packet of chips in the pretext of ‘Study fuel’ announced a break.
As the gossip shifted to PJs, Polo, who is famous for her unique style of humor, asked us,
“Okay if Gabbar singh had a tiger cub, what would it be called?”
Our over fatigued neurons had no answer though Jayaprakash tried her level best to come up with something.
“Holi!” answered Polo.
“Figure that out for us as usual”, said we.
“Arre,” said Polo, “Remember in the movie, Gabbar keeps saying Holi kab hai?? Holi ‘cub’ hai??”
If there ever was a concept of a collective mind blast, it had to happen exactly at that time. As smoke came out of our ears at that PJ, Polo had more gems to shower on us.
“If you connect two Peepul trees, what do you get?”
Of course, with half burnt minds, we didnt have the answer.
“Nokia,” said Polo triumphantly.
“How?” we asked.
“Arre, isn’t Nokia about connecting ‘peepul’?”
I am looking for a human vaporiser or something similar. Meanwhile, MANAC beckons…

I am jolted out of my ‘gham’ right there. ‘Khunnas?’ I look at Bhatta. She seems to have got it alright and is nodding her miniscule head vigorously. The closest I have ever come to this word was when I had some ‘Hummus’ some years ago at a Lebanese place.
“What?” I ask.
“Abey, Khunnus mat dikha…”
I am scanning my limited Hindi vocabulary in my South-Indian brain for anything close to this word. Maybe it is Iranian.
Bhatta, meanwhile is tired of us.
She jumps down the stairs, ponytail waving in the air and then turns back to me and says,
“Hat, Paanchat!!”

Paanchat? As in a chat made of Paan? Whatever….After endless googling and consulting the Baap of Mumbaiya slang, I’ve found out that ‘khunnas’ and ‘Paanchat’ are very much common words like ‘attitude’ and ‘Wierdo’. Meanwhile, Parashar, Bhatta, Kulkarni and Shirodkar are busy generating more words in their room. I sometimes hear cries of anguish from the third floor from fellow ignorant beings who are trying to decipher this hi-fi language. I sometimes feel like giving back in Tamil. But before I can transfer my thoughts to my tongue, this ‘bhai’ style gang has called me the choicest of slangs and dissapeared before I can say ‘Kill Bill’!

Then, if someone asks me why my mouth is open like a gaping fish. I only have to say,

There are a lot of B-School competitions doing the rounds on sustainabilty, and it set my curious alarm ringing. A bit of googling and asking around and some really good information materialized.
There are many definitions to sustainability and it can give rise to hotly contested debates. But one of the closest and very simple ones comes from Professor Rebecca Henderson, Business strategy expert and MIT Sloan professor :

Ways for economic activities to not actively degrade the future capacity of natural systems
Need to reduce carbon, water use, and waste and to build sustainable societies and personal lives

Today marked the end of an era of sales and distribution knowledge in the lives of about a hundred students at SCMHRD. Without any historic drama attached to it, it means we had our last Sales and Distribution Management (SADMAN) lecture. And SADMAN was definitely not sad(pun intended) owing to the efforts of one man : Professor Prantosh Bannerjee.
Professor Bannerjee has been instrumental in teaching us every little bit of marketing that made its ways to our overfatigued neurons in the first semester. He believes in OHP sheets, tantrums and a lot of dedication. Popular sayings in Prantosh Sir’s vocabulary include:
* The quintessential ‘So how are we doing today’ : Even the CIA would have trouble decoding the tone. Tantrum in the making or just a jolly good wish?
* ‘Common, all future CEOs!’ : One time when everyone actually believes that CEOgiri is not very far away.
* “How would I know? I am ninety three years old.” : I am still figuring out the vitality the human brain can possess at this age.
* “Are we sleeping?” : A technique of prising open the eyelids of a tired class.
And many more…
But little did one know that marketing could be taught in a way that it could make you laugh, cry and grin in embarassment, all at the same time. One still remembers the very moving lecture on the different lifecycle stages in a person’s life, the mirth when one learnt about the buying decisions of a child and so on…
A great class all in all…